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The Secret Volvo Doesn’t Want You to Know About Their New Cars

rev up your engines, welcome to my
Thursday video, where I answer a viewers question with an entire video and
today’s question comes from John, and John asks, hey I was looking at Volvos
the other day and I noticed the one being sold here in the United States
was made in China what’s up with that yes well that’s true, here’s the history
of Volvo to explain what’s happened to Volvo, now Volvo started making
cars in Sweden in 1927 and they made simple reliable cars in the 1960s an
aunt of mine had a P 1800 those cute little sports cars and she got a million
miles out of hers, it had carburetors on it it was simple, they were very reliable
very simple car, a lot of people liked them they were kind of a niche car and
the Swedes had a very good system for building the cars, most of the people in
the factory were trained to do all the different parts, so rather than put bolts
on the wheel their entire life and being bored out of their mind, they do one part
of the car for a while and then the next month they do another part, so they had a
happy labor force that was really motivated and they made really good
simple cars, but then in 1985 they started designing and making front-wheel
drive cars, before this there were all simple rear-wheel drive cars like a
Model T Ford, simple technology that worked great and they started to make
them in a larger mass-produced situation than they had before, so they’re going to
a new technology front-wheel drive and building a lot more of them and they had
quite a few problems, in the late 80s and the mid and early 90s Volvo’s had a lot
of problems with their cars, the automatic transmissions had problems,
head gaskets were blowning because they were going to a new engine design that
was front-wheel drive and a new transmission design that was front-wheel
drive and that led Volvo to have a lot of problems especially economically, so
in 1999 Ford Motor Company bought Volvo Ford Motor Company own Volvo from 1999
to 2010 and they shared some technologies, but still it was pretty
much a failure for Ford because in 2010 they sold it to Geely a Chinese
company at a really low price they lost money on a deal there’s no arguing that,
now Geely is one of the smaller car
manufacturers in China I believe they are like 7th or 8th most
popular or something like that, but they decided to take a chance and buy Volvo
so today there’s three factories in China that build Volvo’s but only one
factory in Sweden that builds Volvo’s and there’s also an assembly plant in
South Carolina that builds Volvo, they don’t do it from scratch, they put them
together that’s why it’s called an assembly plant, and I find that kind of
amusing because years ago I bought this Husqvarna chainsaw thinking, oh the
Swedes really know how to make chain saws, only to find out when I did the
fine print did a little research this chain saw it wasn’t made in Sweden, it
was made in South Carolina, so I guess the Swedes or today the Chinese have a
thing for either Southern women or a warmer climate than where they come from
in Sweden, now I do have to say this Husqvarna that I bought that was made in
South Carolina has worked perfectly fine for years I’ve had no problems with it
at all and if anything the quality that I’ve seen in the Volvos that are make
china, is the same or maybe even a little better than the stuff that they were
making it Sweden, but the Geely company that owns Volvo they’re doing big
changes at Volvo they are stressing the manufacture of
three and four cylinder gasoline and diesel engines and drop in the larger
engine sizes and they recently announced that Volvo as of 2019 are only going to
be producing full electric vehicles or hybrid electric vehicles like a Toyota
Prius, so take that into consideration I would not buy a new Volvo gas or diesel
engine because they’re not going to be building them anymore and who knows what
kind of upkeep they’re gonna have on parts and maintenance, because Volvo’s
arch competitors for a while at least in Sweden was Saab and they went
bankrupt years ago they had enough problem with parts here in the United
States being expensive and nobody could figure out how to fix them, even when
they were in existence, but now that Saab is bankrupt don’t go out and buy a Saab
unless you want a lawn ornament, cuz you can’t get parts for them, hardly anybody’s
gonna work on them and they’re very complex cars and Volvo itself has always
been a relatively high-tech car, so I’m not saying they can’t make the
technology right, cuz in 2019 they’re only gonna make electric cars and hybrid cars
they’ll probably make really good ones but as I talked about before, the
infrastructure for electric cars is still a long way away and hybrid cars
are super complex and super expensive to fix as they break down, I mean I got a lot
of customers even today that don’t buy Volvos they lease them, so if you were
thinking about that in the future maybe you would lease an electric or hybrid
Volvo car and then you wouldn’t have any long-term commitments for expensive
repairs as they age, because throughout their history,
Volvo’s have been pretty reliable cars certainly for the first ten years or a
hundred thousand miles of ownership so if you’re a leasing electric or hybrid
car and it doesn’t break while you’re leasing it what do you care
and realize that the factories that are making Volvo’s in China are very new
factories, you know they built them in just the past few years and they’re
really high tech, their main problem is finding good labor for them because the
robots build most of it, so most of their labor have to be trained engineers that
can fix the robots and maintain them while they’re doing a 365 days a year 24
hours a day building of the cars, there’s no downtime with the machines but even
the machines that build the machines are gonna break down and need to reprogramming as time goes on so now you know Volvo’s are made in
China, and since this is the Thursday segment where I answer a viewers
question, place your own question on the YouTube comments below and I’ll pick the
best ones to make a single video to answer your questions, and where else can
you find a guy with 50 years experience of fixing cars to answer your own
question with a video, so if you never want to miss another one of my new car
repair videos, remember to ring that Bell!